Dresden 2009 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 8: Developmental Processes
BP 8.10: Vortrag
Dienstag, 24. März 2009, 12:30–12:45, HÜL 186
Morphogen dynamics and growth control during development — •Peer Mumcu1, Thomas Bittig1, Ortrud Wartlick2, Anna Kicheva2, Marcos González-Gaitán2, and Frank Jülicher1 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden — 2Department of Biochemistry and Department of Molecular Biology, Geneva University, Sciences II, Quai Ernest-Ansermet 30, 1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
Growing organs in developing animals have the ability to control their size and shape autonomously. Morphogens are a special class of signaling molecules which play a key role in this process. They are secreted from localized sources and spread throughout the growing tissue where they are degraded. They thereby form graded concentration profiles which provide the target tissue with positional information. We present a theoretical study of the transport of morphogens in growing epithelia using a continuum theory and a two-dimensional vertex model. In the vertex model the adherence junctions of the cells are represented as a network of polygons and morphogen transport is described by a diffusion current between neighbouring cells. Within this framework we study the dynamics of the morphogen gradient and we discuss the relationship between the spatio-temporal morphogen levels and the growth rate of the tissue during development. We compare our theory to experimental data from the developing Drosophila wing imaginal disc, a precursor of the fly wing.